Pair of Chickadees Turquoise Bracelet

It is January and everything is grey and frozen and the feeder has been empty since yesterday because you forgot to fill it, and then you look out the window and there they are anyway, two chickadees working the bare branches of the oak tree with complete focus and zero complaints, finding things you cannot see, perfectly content in conditions that would send most creatures somewhere warmer. You watch them for longer than you meant to. You feel better than you did before you looked.

The Black-Capped Chickadee

The black-capped chickadee is one of the few birds that does not migrate, does not hibernate, and does not appear to find a New Hampshire winter particularly inconvenient. It stays. It figures things out. It is, pound for pound, one of the most quietly extraordinary animals in the northeastern woods.

Each autumn, as the days shorten and the temperatures drop, the chickadee begins hiding food. Seeds tucked under bark. Insects cached in lichen. Berries stored in crevices all across its territory. A single chickadee can cache up to a thousand seeds in a single day, and up to eighty thousand in a season, each one in a different hiding spot. And here is the part that stops you completely: in order to remember all of those locations, the chickadee's hippocampus, the region of the brain responsible for spatial memory, physically grows by up to thirty percent every autumn. New neurons form. New memory capacity is created. And then in spring, when the caching season ends and the world fills back up with food, the hippocampus shrinks again until next year.

The chickadee grows a bigger brain for winter and then gives it back in spring. It does this every year for its entire life. It is also, somehow, still small enough to fit in the palm of your hand and still puffed up and cheerful at your feeder on the coldest mornings, which feels like it should not be possible but clearly is.

They are also among the first birds to begin singing in late winter, sometimes as early as January, that clear two-note fee-bee call that means spring is coming even when the ground is still frozen. The females are discerning. The males sing their hearts out. This has been working for them for a very long time.

The Piece

Two chickadees face each other from either end of a sterling silver cuff bracelet, each one hand cut and etched and given a darkening patina that brings out the black cap and bib that give them their name. Between them, held at the center of the bracelet, a pear-shaped Sonoran Gold turquoise stone sits in a simple setting, its rich green threaded through with warm golden matrix, no two stones alike, mined in Arizona. The turquoise feels exactly right between two birds that know how to find treasure in unlikely places.

The bracelet is 7.5 inches long, entirely handmade from scratch in sterling silver, with a lobster clasp closure.

The Craftsmanship

• Bracelet: 7.5 inches long, lobster clasp
• Stone: Sonoran Gold turquoise, pear shaped, mined in Arizona
• Material: sterling silver throughout, oxidized
• Closure: lobster clasp
• Edition: one of a kind

One of a Kind

There is only one of this bracelet in the world. These two chickadees, this particular stone with its warm golden matrix, this exact pair facing each other across the silver: they exist once. When it finds its person it will never be made again exactly like this.

A Note from Tamara

I have a deep and slightly embarrassing affection for chickadees and I will not apologize for it. There is something about a bird that chooses to stay through a New Hampshire winter, that grows itself a bigger brain every autumn to handle what is coming, that shows up at the feeder puffed and cheerful on the coldest mornings, that fills me with a very specific kind of admiration. I put turquoise between them because it is the color of the sky on a clear cold January day when everything is frozen and the chickadees are out there anyway, doing exactly what they always do, completely unbothered, finding everything they need.

Shipping

Your chickadee bracelet is finished, packaged safely, and will be on its way to you within 3 to 5 business days.